♪♪ Can the lens capture how men really feel?

Today on "Generational Anxiety," we're talking to men about men -- what they think, how they feel, and how the way we capture men on camera is changing.

♪♪ And that's what love is.

Love's got your back.

It's a reaching.

It's a yearning.

It's an aching.

♪♪ I think silence prohibits expectations.

Are we being heard?

Are we being seen?

I think people feel safe when they can define you.

We created this show because the world is changing.

♪♪ My first guest is a living legend in the world of documentary and street photography who has changed the way we see the American inner cities.

Winner of countless awards for his work depicting the '90s street gangs of East L.A. and poetic scenes of '80s Spanish Harlem, his photos can be found in museums across the globe from Helsinki to Harlem, but he's a Brooklynite through and through.

Author of seven books and now an NYU professor, he's a great storyteller, photographer, and friend.

Please welcome Mr. Joseph Rodriguez.

My next guest is a Nigerian Canadian creative director who's pushing the bounds of visual storytelling.

Best known for his work "The Hair Appointment," a live photography exhibition exploring the intimacy of Black braiding salons, his photos bring new light to stories of coming of age, African heritage, and human emotion.

Founder of creative agency Sunday School Company, he's shaping the way we see modern Africa and its global impact on culture.

Hailing from Toronto, please welcome Josef Adamu.

Welcome.

Thank you both for being here today.

Thank you, Joseph.

Thank you, Joseph.

For the purposes of this show, I'm going to call you Joe and I'm going to call you Joseph, to just make it clear to the audience.

So today's episode called "Portrait of Manhood," and it's about exactly that -- how men are portrayed in popular culture, in photography and storytelling.

I know you're both photographers and storytellers in your own right, and so I want to ask you a question.

Take it however you will.

What's going on with men in this country today?

Well, thank you for having us.

We appreciate being here with you.

There's a lot to discuss, what's going on with men today?

It depends on also the age of the men today, you know?

If we look at a lot of the youth, for example, which is where I spend a lot of my sort of documentary practice on -- from what I learn through my interviews and photography and books is, they have a lot of stories to tell.

One, starting with family.

A lot of the young men that I sort of keep in touch with, even, I photographed when they were 14 or 15 years old, are now grown men, and they have struggled to try to make their lives better, but there's a lot of challenges.

For example, if you get caught up in the criminal justice system and you come back to the same place that you grew up in, that you live in, you know, you've got to deal with the issues of, number one issue would be education.

Right.

Work.

And how can I make that happen for myself?

College education has gotten to be so much a business that what I hear from a lot of the youth from L.A. to New York, Chicago, Miami, it's the same conversation.

"I don't know if I want to put myself in a situation where I'm going to have to owe a lot of money for a lot of years coming out of school."

Mm-hmm.

So that kind of like is one sort of layer that a lot of young people are looking at right now.

"Hey, I want to go to Harvard or I want to go here, but can I make it there?

Are my grades good enough?

Can I make it?"

And if things are not really calm and supportive at home...

Right.

...which happens a lot, in a lot of the inner cities throughout the country, where do you find your quiet?

Where do you find your calm?

Where do you find your support network?

And that's a lot to do with family.

So what I see through the young people today is really how you are growing up in the environment you're living in every day, and what's that like?

We all know what those issues are.

We've heard about the gun violence.

We've heard about all these other issues of taking too many drugs or maybe having too many children at an early age.

But a lot of this really has to come back to the family.

And that's why, you know, I like -- my approach to starting a project is always interviewing families at home, perhaps in their kitchen table where things can safely be discussed.

Yeah.

Right.

And then I think I have to answer that question a little bit more personally, because I have to think about what it was like for me when I was 16 years old and growing up in a family that was fractured.

You know, my my stepfather was a heroin addict.

So, you know, we had to deal with that daily, every day occurrence of like, you know, gee, I'm working hard, I'm shining shoes, but he's taking my money, he's using it for himself, Wow.

arguing with my mom, my mom's sleeping with her pocketbook underneath the pillow, you know?

I mean, this is kind of a normal conversation that you can hear throughout a lot of the inner cities in the country.

So the support for me as a young man wasn't really there, right?

So school, I leave school, I go onto the streets, I run away from home.

I get into hanging out with my friends on the corner and got into the drug game and start trying to deal drugs.

And then I got arrested, went to Rikers Island the first time.

Wow.

And then it happened again, because I still didn't have it together.

But as I came out the second time from Rikers Island, it was more of a wake-up call, because now I'm older.

I'm not a teenager anymore.

How old?

I was 19 my second time.

First time, 17.

Wow, okay, right.

Wow.

Yeah.

And that was just horrible, what happened in Rikers Island to me.

I was sexually assaulted, you know, just all that trauma.

So more trauma at home, then more trauma in the criminal justice system.

And that's how you came of age.

And that's how I came of age.

And then, so using drugs was, like Billie Holiday would always sing, you know, "the white lady," heroin, she's talking about, who takes all pain away, at least for several hours, but then I got got caught up again.

And so at what point do you pick up the camera?

Actually, the second time I came out of Rikers, my probation officer said to me, "You better get a job."

So I got a job working at what's now called Macy's, downtown Brooklyn, it was Abraham & Strauss.

So while I was working that job, I was trying to expand my mind and sort of look into different ways of sort of dealing with the negative and turning it into a positive.

And so school became something I had to sort of look at again.

I had to get my GED, so it was really in steps and stages.

But I would say that after that job, I got another job working at a shoe Polish factory in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and then I would be walking home and in walking home on Bedford Avenue, I noticed the Brooklyn Children's Museum, and it was an African-American photojournalist by the name of Beuford Smith that was teaching this class on black and white photography.

Wow.

And I just grabbed the opportunity, and it was a weekend class.

And he taught us how to make our own darkroom.

And now I leave my neighborhood and I move into Fort Greene, which was no party then.

It was really a very dangerous and very tough place.

But I started using a camera in an amateur way.

I started shooting buildings and trees and afraid of people, always afraid of people.

And started to shoot.

And so that gave me something more to look forward to than just a job.

I can create something that mine.

Even though I was an amateur.

I was an amateur, but...

But that was the beginning.

I want to bring you into this conversation, Joseph, because you're not American.

You are Nigerian-Canadian.

I am.

And so you have actually come of age in this country, I would say.

How old are you now?

29.

You're 29.

You moved here in, what?

25, 26?

26.

3 years ago, yeah.

You came here at such a pivotal age as an artist and as a man, and your experiences of manhood and American manhood are so different.

And so what is the story you see of the American man, and how did it sort of differ from how you grew up or your upbringing?

I think coming here from Toronto, Canada, from a Nigerian-Canadian home, very specific.

There was a lot more of a welcoming to diversity where I'm coming from In Toronto?

Yeah.

Wow.

So coming to New York City specifically, I did see the... What's the best way to put this?

Its hostility?

I did see some hostility, but I also saw how well different cultures kind of submerged and came together.

But I think when I look at the American story, it does still feel very segregated.

And in comparison to where I'm coming from, where I wouldn't say, like, racism is nonexistent, but it is not as apparent as it may be in certain parts of America.

It kind of opened my eyes a little bit, and I had to really think of things from a different perspective.

In what way?

Like, you came and suddenly you're viewed as a Black person, and it doesn't matter where you came from, what the origins, you're a Black man in America.

Right.

Right, whereas...

So that suddenly, it's yours, that's your experience.

100%.

Whereas in Toronto, very similar to London, you come from Nigerian origins, you come from Ethiopian origins, you come from Albanian origins, It's tribal.

whatever that may be.

I had to kind of adjust to that, and I had to make room for that.

In my storytelling, a lot of it is inspired by my African origins and how that blends with the Western world.

Coming to somewhere like New York, I don't feel like I had to change my storytelling direction, per se.

When you think about the American story in general, there isn't as much room for that story to be told.

When I'm looking to work with brands or I'm on a partnership opportunity, my African origin isn't as important as me being Black.

And that vibrancy that I've always had in me is sort of disappearing in some ways.

So I use my personal projects, my personal storytelling, my agency, Sunday School Creative, to really emphasize and exclaimate that importance of origin stories.

I just wish there was more room for that vibrancy.

I wish there was more room for the fluidity with our storytelling, for the fluidity amongst manhood as well.

So I'm still figuring out what that American story is, when it comes to that... We all are still figuring out.

...the male perspective.

And just listening to Joseph speak about his experiences it's sort of like listening to a movie, in a way.

Yeah, very cinematic.

You know what I mean?

So you take as you're giving as well.

Well, you know what?

I'll just intervene on that.

You say, "I'm still figuring out this story," but in reality, like, you two are writing it.

That's what artists do.

Like, you're writing that story.

And I think a question that I have -- what I notice the difference is in your work is that there's this huge generational shift between how men are portrayed.

Joe, in the '80s, you actually told me in a separate conversation at one point, publications didn't want to pick up your work unless they saw a gun or a needle in a photo.

And you know, Josef, with your work, it's a much more tender, sort of heroic, humane portrait of men.

And so I kind of wonder, and either of you can start, like, where does that shift come from?

When did it happen?

But with your work, that tender and humane portrait, a lot of men these days say that it's emasculating or they feel, you know, that men are not portrayed as manly anymore, like, they don't have that sort of strength or that sort of resolve and honesty that is present in your work, Joe.

So what is the difference, and how do you see that?

Because I know you've both interacted with one another's work, So how do you feel about that?

Well, growing up in the inner city of New York City, I think most teenagers, you have to have a certain kind of... Grit?

Grit that you can hold on to, because it's a tough town to grow up in, in high school and subways and all these places.

So I had to sort of grow up tough.

I mean, in my earlier years.

And fast.

But one thing I think that I was blessed with was I had my mother and three aunts, and they all had problems with their men.

So this is where the kitchen table comes in.

Yeah.

Every weekend when they would gather and the kids would all be playing and we're watching TV or we're doing whatever, and they would be sitting there talking about their men.

Always.

Always talking about their men.

And so... Men you can't even see.

You don't see them, but you hear about them all the time.

Exactly.

And I would pick up on the questions that they would -- or some of the issues that they were talking about.

Like what?

For example, did your husband cheat on you?

Did he...?

Where was he last night?

Where was he?

Why is he looking at me?

Because the sisters would always have this issue between their men, right?

Gotcha.

And then Saturday night would come, right?

And then my mother would change the light bulbs, put the red light bulb in, 'cause we lived in a small, little apartment.

Put the curtain up and Dinah Washington would come on, and so they would start dancing slow and everything was great until Budweiser came in.

And when Budweiser -- that's the beer of America -- would come in, and then after a few drinks, then the tensions would start.

So a lot of this real life that was happening in front of my eyes as a seven, eight, nine, ten year old, kind of stayed with me.

It's cinematic, even as you describe it now.

The red light.

Yeah, and so I just think that... learning how to listen was something that I guess I picked up on as a young person.

You know, and having that heart, because I grew up Christian and Catholic.

We're always supposed to help the other, right?

And I didn't like seeing my mom get abused and hit and all those other things.

Then when she would cry, and so all that pain would go into my heart.

And I didn't know that all of these real life episodes were fueling what I'm going to care about later on with my photography.

So learning how to be tough, because my mom was the one who said, "Listen, you're 10.

You can't let that boy take over you.

You've got to fight back.

Fight back."

Even though you come home with a broken nose or whatever.

But I guess I was blessed to understand the feminine side of what it's like, that we all have, men, that we all have.

We all have it.

We just afraid of it, right?

And we're taught not to be that way.

And now we have this mantra in our country where we're trying to go back to the old way.

We gotta to be macho.

We got to be strong, and we got to be -- Controlling women's bodies.

But I think something my mom and my aunt said to me, "A real man -- You want to be a real man?

Then you got to be a father to your kids."

And that's a place that I did not come -- We didn't have that in our families.

America, hear that.

"You want to be a real man, take care of your kids."

Yeah, and I think that that's really important.

But I think for my work, there's two sides.

I guess it's the Gemini and me.

I'm a Libra.

I have two sides too.

I'm a Capricorn.

I'm so sorry.

So when I look at subjects, I'm asking you, how do you want to be represented?

Right, right.

And so in L.A., I'm talking to gangsters and kids walking around with big guns in their hands and feeling King Kong and doing all of that.

And that's the choice of how they want to...

But talking to their mothers, I got a different side of the story, and sitting there with them, eating dinner, then you get to see the son who listens to the mother.

It's a very different approach than a lot of the photographers that I was sort of emulating of the time, of the '80s.

A lot of Magnum photographers, a lot of guys who were real macho, they would go in and shoot the guns and shoot this and shoot that.

But it's almost like shooting an addict, for example -- and myself, being an ex-heroin addict, I know what that addiction is.

Those challenges are to this day.

But you're not going to tell me that just because you're an addict, you can't be a good -- you can't love your kids.

Be humanized, right.

And the way I would see the images -- and this is where the the editors come in -- was always about how we would, you know, I'd open up the daily news, I'd see who got murdered, who got thrown off the roof, and why we are always this terrible group of people.

It was on the outside looking in.

Meanwhile, I stayed, doing "East Side Stories: Gang Life in East L.A." I started in 1992.

Well, guess what?

I went back after 20 years.

I went back after 22 years.

Now it's 25 years, where I'm photographing and I'm interviewing these young boys that are now men, who are now fathers, who have changed, are bus drivers, they're not gangsters.

So what I've been trying to tell the editors from the 1980s on is that we have a different perspective on how to tell the story.

We're not going to shy away from what the problems are.

If there's gun violence and somebody dies and the parents are asking me, "Please photograph it, 'cause it's important."

But there's another side to that story, and the story is redemption.

People do change.

That's the American narrative.

That's what we are.

Look at our literature.

Right.

Right?

Well, you know, that's the thing.

I'll pass it to you, Josef, because your work similarly begins in the home.

I know that you love coming-of-age narratives that are about bedrooms and basketball courts and really, home life.

And similar to what you just said, Joe, like, it starts at the kitchen table.

Where does home come in, in the story of manhood in your work?

I think the importance of home starts with the root of a lot of our learnings -- a lot of the things we learn begins within the home.

And it's such a sacred space that I feel like a lot of us are authentic.

I think it's a space where we, again, learn and develop knowledge from our parents.

Things are passed down, gems are shared.

So for me, going back to that home for storytelling is so important, because it feels safe.

It feels like a space where we can all come together and be our true selves.

And when I'm working with subjects, whether as a photographer or as an image maker, meaning a creative director, art director, I find it extremely important to get to know or get to the root of that story.

What happens in this home?

Right.

You know, speak me through a week.

Speak me through how dinner is made.

Speak me through how you make your bed, etc.

I'm extremely intricate about all the details and how important it is to get to the bottom of that and make you really warm up to the situation.

Speaking through even Joseph's work and just knowing how specific his approach may be when working with these talents or subjects.

You can tell that a conversation is had prior to taking that shot, right, or building a book, etc.

And I kind of take a hint out of that book with my approach.

A lot of the work, as I mentioned before, deals with the African origin.

So I'm working with kids between the ages of 15 and 22, and I see myself in them when I'm telling these stories.

I think it's so important to know like, what are you into, what sports do you play?

How's your mental health?

What's your religious background?

How did you grow up?

Were you allowed to party at 16, right?

What you get into?

When did you get your first tattoo?

And it really loosens them up, because they find someone that they can see themselves in.

And that makes for such a great portrait or that makes for such a great story.

So I think it's really important to have home in that aspect, yeah.

When you say that, one thing that I think about is the fact that the viewer is at such a disadvantage compared to you all that are behind the camera, because we just get the photo and maybe the little line item or the caption under it.

Like Joe, you've told me before, you consider yourself more of a sociologist than a photographer.

And I know with you, Josef, you consider yourself foremost a storyteller and not a photographer.

So when you all interact with these young men, what are we missing when we get the photo at the very end of the story?

Like, what is happening with young men that you all can see that maybe as a woman, I can't see, or as a viewer, an outsider.

I know your job, you've told me before, Josef, is to invite people into that experience of the other, to allow them to embrace it.

And for young men, for them to see themselves and have that sort of pride.

But what is the outsider missing about what's going on in the minds and hearts of young men today, modern times?

I'd have to say that when I'm talking and working like Josef is, you know, we're detail driven, both of us, so understanding this young person in their private space, in their room.

Why that photo?

Why those sneakers?

Why?

Because all of it is about image, especially for young people, right?

I mean, I'm 71 years old, but I don't forget what it's like to be 15.

I never do.

I will never do that, because that's the real challenge of becoming a young man, right?

Is those teenage years when we do silly things like the first kiss or my pimples on my face, or I don't feel my -- I think my nose is too wide or all these sort of insecurities that we have as young people.

And now the insecurities are probably -- I don't know, they just seem a lot -- We don't talk about young male insecurities either.

So much for me, I actually never even thought about how men go through those changes that young women go through.

Oh, it's incredible.

Because young women, they're macro-graphed in society.

And especially now with Instagram, we know, young women are suffering because of body image, but it's not talked about with young men.

So it's very interesting that you say that.

No, I think that's important.

I mean, what's going through their heads is just probably too much going on.

Yeah.

I'm sure we can make this program be a lot longer in time, if we were actually to bring in some subjects and have them speak for it, which would be great.

Right.

You know, this takes me back to when when Black Entertainment Network started, right?

We were all excited.

Everybody in my hood and in many hoods around the country were like, "Oh, my God, BET."

This is fantastic.

We don't need MTV anymore."

And then they had Teen Summit.

And that used to come on Saturday mornings, alright?

And you'd have a group of teenagers in an audience like this, you'd have the narrator asking, like yourself, asking, what are the issues of the day for you?

And that was brilliant.

That was brilliant.

Because now they can speak to us, to you, to your grandparents, to whatever.

Now we do it on Instagram.

Now we do it on Twitter.

Now we do it that way.

Sometimes it gets a little bit fractured, because you don't get the whole nuance of what they're saying or who's there.

But there's so much packed into that question that it would take a little bit more time to really deeply look at.

But I think actually what you're getting at, I completely understand, because I recently told -- I was talking to my sister about men that cat call, and I told her, like, in my neighborhood, I'm always being catcalled, like, constantly.

And one day I saw these guys on the stoop -- young men, couldn't have been more than, like, 25.

And I just talked to them and I said, "Good morning," after they were catcalling, and I was like, "Listen, you don't have to talk to me like this."

I said, "You can just say good morning."

And they were like, "Oh, my bad," and suddenly were shocked.

And I told my sister, sometimes I feel partially it's misogyny, patriarchy, yada, yada, yada, but it's also when you don't feel like what you're saying is important or that nobody is listening to it, you'll say anything.

And suddenly when you engage and you talk to people instead of past them or around them, they find like, wait, what I say matters.

Like, this is a person that feels things.

And maybe you can argue, oh, is it a woman's responsibility or should -- But for me, in that moment, it was just like, I see you.

I see you on the stoop.

I see you when I come home.

I see you, you see me.

We can talk directly to one another.

And it was also this idea, I don't fear you.

Like, this is not making me feel diminished.

This is not even making me feel uncomfortable.

It's actually just something that I'm going to roll my eyes at, but now we're neighbors.

And I think that what's missing is that a lot of young men don't feel like they're being heard and they don't feel -- you know, women -- I know this is a very big generalization, I'll probably get letters about it -- but my dad was always like, men are nonverbal communicators.

Like, women talk.

We love to.

This is the occupation I chose was like, talking.

But it began at my kitchen table, like you said, just the same with your aunts.

So do you feel that?

I'll direct it toward you, Josef.

Do men feel like you all are being listened to?

Sometimes.

I think beyond being listened to, I think men fear losing that dominance, I think, at times, and forget how to just be -- just be.

Just be.

Just be.

So when I think about, whether it's the bedroom or the workplace or whatever that may be, and this notion that men are meant to be in the driver's seat and women are meant to listen.

Where does that come from, do you think?

Upbringing or...?

I know it's a lot of thing.

Traditional media.

Religion.

You say it's still there, that idea that men are dominant, in the driver's seat, it's still something that is being pushed.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

I come from an immigrant home, so I can talk to you about this from a very specific perspective.

Oh, yeah, you're Nigerian.

It's still there and it's continuous.

Wow.

And it puts this fear in men, so they play defense immediately.

They block any attempt at woman progression.

They block any attempt at women dominance, because it makes them feel uncomfortable.

And yet, Black households are mostly matriarchal.

That's what kind of gets me.

Right.

I think, Joseph, you told me about your work, in order to access these gang members that you access in East L.A., oftentimes, you would go to their mothers.

Is that correct?

Tell me that story.

I love that story.

That's totally correct.

Yeah.

I mean, I would just go to high schools in the city of Watts, for example, and just hang around the high school and then meet a couple of teenagers that would be open and say, "Well, if I'm going to work with you..." And this is when they got a little thrown off.

First, I'd ask, "Where you from?"

"Well, I'm from Harlem.

I'm from Brooklyn.

Oh, this guy's from there."

"Okay, good, but I need to talk to your mother.

Wow.

And if it's not your mama, I need to talk to your grandmama, because that's the way I want to start."

And that's the way we kind of started.

We can talk about this a little bit in, but how the whole project kind of started.

But I wanted to come back to something that you raised right now, which is what young men think and where they are.

And I can remember when I was 18 and I had a girlfriend and we first moved into our first apartment in Fort Greene.

Rent was really cheap, so we can do it.

And I was still messed up.

I was on methadone at the time.

She was going to City College and studying anthropology, and I had nothing.

Literally, I had a factory job at the time and I'm just on this medicine every day, and you become trapped to that.

And I was intimidated by her, because she was going to school.

Speak on it.

And that is a huge thing for young inner city brothers, right?

It's such a problem.

Yes.

Because -- and this goes way back, right?

We're talking about the '70s now.

And so what do I do?

I didn't love myself, first of all, because I had to figure that out.

It took about ten years to figure out.

This is a different show, talking to you.

I had nine lives before that.

So I'm hitting her.

I'm abusing her.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not to the point where the cops came or anything, but it was -- It was definitely not the thing to do.

Hit anyone, first of all, especially a woman, and having two daughters, I don't even...so...

But I went down a rabbit hole, a real dark space.

Yeah.

And... She finds another boy friend in her class who's African-American and he's got something going on, and I don't have anything going on.

And I had this dream -- and this is a true story.

I have a dream that she's going to come to this house from school and say, "It's over.

We're not gonna..." And that's really what happened.

And so I went down this rabbit hole.

We broke up and she went on to do her life, and that's when I made the change.

That's when I started to go deeper into myself to try to figure out some things and reached out to some therapy.

And there was a lot of work for your boy to do.

I had the anger problem I had to deal with.

I had to deal with the education, the lack of this.

And then then once I got off methadone, that was probably tough to do, but it was more about changing the mind, right?

And that's what I've been trying to -- I'm not an activist, but to a very humanistic sort of platform, using my photography to kind of let these young men look at themselves.

Because "East Side Stories: Gang Life in East L.A.," that book is, throughout Los Angeles and California and Arizona, has been used by many of these men and women to help them kind of look at their lives and maybe kind of change the direction of something, because that's what it's always been about for me.

But learning that practice, which I then share with my daughters, who now are going out with a young man who doesn't have, and he's abusing her.

And I was there, I almost -- It was a little bit tense when I was there in Sweden with my daughter and her boyfriend who was really kind of talking bad to her.

And I almost got violent with him and sort of -- and my daughter stopped me because, all fathers are going to protect their daughters.

That's just it.

Don't touch my daughter.

But then I had a very serious conversation with her later.

Right.

And that's when I expressed my story to her and said, "When a young man does not have a goal in his life, a positive goal, an education, a good job..." The interesting thing, in the '90s, especially in New York, you saw a lot of these young men, they weren't out there shooting people.

They were out there working.

They had money in their pocket.

They can buy some clothes, they can do this, they can do that.

You feel a sense that, especially for men, you feel the sense of worth...

In ownership.

And ownership.

I mean, why are we having all these suicides in the country?

I mean, look at these older men, white, Black, purple.

It doesn't matter what race you are.

It has a lot to do with where you're standing in life, right?

And if you have too much on your shoulders and you can't afford to give or do... You're under that weight.

That's it.

You're cracking under the weight.

Exactly.

Well, Josef, I think this is really interesting, because for Joe, a lot of your purview and your work, it's men at the lowest point often, in their lives, or at a turning point.

But, Josef, your work a lot of times is men on the mountaintop.

I know you just shot a huge project with NBA players and it's like, what is it like to be, you know, around champions and people who are, you know, they've realized the American dream?

They're at the height of that success.

That's a very different portrait of manhood.

Oh, definitely.

I was the production designer on a Showtime project not too long ago that had to do with NBA legends, and I think, my biggest trick when I'm working with anybody, regardless of them being NBA legends or someone, my neighbor back home in in Bed-Stuy, is to meet them where they're at and to just try to pull out that inner child they once were.

Wow, yeah.

With very, very simple questions, or just checking in.

At the end of the day, they once were seven years old.

They once were 15 years old, going into a high school basketball practice, trying to figure out where they're going for college.

So just kind of like, nibbling at that and trying to get a better sense of who they are at their core is always really important for me.

I don't necessarily look at them as these massive figures or these NBA greats, even though I respect them as if they are.

And it really helps the relationship and it really helps with, you know, where they're positioned on camera or what kind of -- But how different are they from like, say, the young, 17-year-old boy that you just shot in their bedroom?

It's like, they are -- when people think a portrait of perfect manhood, people are thinking of, you know, the LeBron James' of the world, the Barack Obamas.

Like, the men that made it to the mountaintop and realized and did what they said they're going to do.

That's very different than the one that's just coming of age or struggling to make ends meet or facing recidivism after Rikers.

Those are two very different kinds of men.

And that one is glorified so much that I think to be able to have that up close, personal experience -- What is it like?

Like, what is that?

And it's not what are they like personally, but what is that kind of manhood?

Is it a fiction?

When you experience it in real life, like, is it even real?

That's a good question.

I think -- Well, for one, they're a lot more media trained, right?

So the experience is there.

There's a facade there.

Right, I'm not having to coach them through how they should be posing or what they should say.

They're often prepared with that.

But I think, honestly, I still kind of speak to them very similar to how I'd speak to the 17-year-old boy, because I was once the 17-year-old boy, and so were they.

Again, I don't have to hold their hand, so it isn't the same as talking to somebody that I'm doing a personal project with.

And with the lights, camera and action, like, you don't have as much time to get into the nitty gritty of their upbringing or figuring out when they last were on film or whatever that may be.

But I think the conversation still remains the same.

It remains constant, especially because a lot of the time, you're dealing with people from the same community.

So these are Black brothers that come from inner city communities and whatnot.

So you speak a certain language, if you get what I'm saying.

Yeah, they made it out.

When it comes to those things.

Exactly.

So I think for less pressure on myself and to just really understand the importance and magnitude of the set or the conversation, I allow myself to just really breathe and just approach like I would approach another conversation in a much less tense environment.

And that's always helped me personally.

I don't necessarily look at it as, okay, this is LeBron James.

Like, be very careful about what you say.

Of course, you you approach it in a very specific way and you tackle certain topics.

But for the most part, I look at it as LeBron James, 17 years old in Akron, Ohio And what would you say to him if he was much younger than you, or what would you say to him if he was the same age as you?

And it makes the process much easier for me, and I apply that to almost everything I do.

And most of the time, these NBA legends or A-list celebrities are very welcoming when you meet them where they're at.

Okay.

Yeah.

Well, I want to share with you all a quote from "Song of Solomon," which is one of my favorite novels by Toni Morrison, and it's a novel about a young man coming of age at the age of 32.

Oh, wow.

And he's kind of exploring himself.

He's getting to know himself, and he's sort of, just as you were talking about, Joe, he's looking at his life through the women around him and he feels almost suffocated.

And I wanted to bring this quote in, because I don't want to have a conversation about manhood absent of women.

I feel like it's kind of naturally come in throughout the conversation.

You all live in so many ways -- like, we're so intermingled and intertwined.

It can't be separate, even if there's misogyny, even if there's misandry, hatred, battleground, like, we live intertwined with one another, and this quote -- Just tell me how you react to it.

I'm going to read it to you.

Toni Morrison wrote...

So I want you all to interact with that.

What is it about choosing how you die, or kind of what you were saying about that moment between you and that young woman?

Like women, they just kind of want -- they just want you, they want your whole self.

They want you to be present.

We kind of talked about it in my last episode with Nikki Giovanni.

Do men feel suffocated by the love of women, by maybe expectation or pressures from the outside?

Like, what is that?

In my case, I can remember my girlfriend saying to me, "What are you thinking?"

Yep.

"What are you thinking?

I mean, that is a classic.

My wife's been telling me that 22 years.

"What are you thinking about?"

Now, I can articulate that.

But then, I didn't have the tools to be able to even look into myself.

And a lot of us men really don't have those tools early on.

What are the tools?

Unless we're lucky and have a Denzel Washington as a father or have that kind of parent.

Because he just recently -- he's all over the Internet talking about the importance of family and the importance of sharing that.

And when you don't have those tools, then you're going to go out and reach out for those sort of people that can sort of guide you in a way.

And unfortunately, in the inner city, you don't necessarily get the best guidance all the time.

But I think that takes some work, right?

I think we're doing better in our education systems now where we can talk about some of these issues.

But for me, it was like, I don't know how to...

I would always say, "Nothing."

"What do you think about, honey?"

I don't...

"Nothing."

Well, let me intervene on that, because what you're saying, you said, when men don't have the tools, they go out and seek that sort of guidance.

But what I find is that when young men don't have the tools, the oftentimes what happens is they want to be surrounded by other people who will not force them to speak.

And I find that, like, in a lot of ways -- and you all can push back on this if you want -- men live in the complicity of silence.

And I find that when you're at the barbershop, people that don't make you -- I've had situations with men that I've met where they'll tell me, "Oh, this guy friend I have, he's going through it."

Like, something with his girlfriend or whatever.

And I was like, "Surely, you're going to intervene.

Surely you're going to tell him, don't walk down the aisle or that's the wrong one, or you're going the wrong direction in life."

And every time, the man would be like, "That's not my business."

And this would be his best friend.

And it's like, it's not like the movies where you stop the guy from making the wrong decision.

Men will let you live your life, go down the rabbit hole as far as it goes, and they won't reach out for a long time.

Is that real?

Do you guys agree, or how do you feel?

I think silence prohibits expectations.

Mm.

Wow.

I think when you don't -- when you don't hold other people accountable, it allows them to kind of take their own individual lane with any situation.

So not saying anything -- So in your situation, when that person has said that's not their business, it allows them to figure it out.

And I'm a victim of that.

I'm a victim of allowing myself to -- not allowing myself -- keeping myself and restricting myself in a bubble and figuring it out silently, because my dad didn't tell me.

He didn't call me out or my uncle didn't pull me to the side for a conversation or my little brother didn't, you know, nudge me and say that wasn't right.

So the expectations really falls on me.

And when you're in charge of that, you're in control.

And men love control.

We love self-control.

And a lot of it also brings up the notion of like, lack of self-love.

When you don't want to fix things, you want to keep certain doors open, it's because there's no self-love.

So of course you're going to feel suffocated if a woman is giving you too much of it or if there's expectations at home from your mom or dad or sister or aunt or niece and nephew.

It starts within.

And if it's not existing within, how are you expecting to get it from someone else?

This is a breakthrough moment for me, because women, I'm seeing such a clear binary.

We are interventionist.

It's kind of, I think it's a maternal thing.

It's like, if you see a child, you know, venturing too far.

Like, my dad, he would let me go into the deep end of the pool and if I drown, he's like, "That's how you learn how to swim."

Whereas a mother, I'm going to reach in and pull you out, because that's so deeply connected.

100%.

But you're telling me it's not out of a lack of love.

The way that men pull themselves back to let you figure it out, that is the kind of love that men are giving.

Is that what you're saying?

A lot of the time.

That's crazy.

It's a cycle.

It's a cycle.

Like, my father had taught me that or my father didn't teach me anything at all.

So this is me kind of just playing that soldier role and letting my daughter figure it out in the pool.

What else do I know, you know?

And I lack that self love, so you're gonna have to figure it out on your own as well.

It's so many ways you can go about it.

That's the tricky thing about it, so yeah.

There's something else here that's much deeper and much older.

Speak on it.

Yeah.

Centuries.

I mean, sometimes white America really doesn't understand what happened.

The British went to Spain, Portugal did it, went to a country, grabbed people, took them against their will, brought them to their homelands to make the countries rich.

Europe is completely like that.

"Exterminate All the Brutes" by Raoul Peck.

Incredible film series.

HBO series.

Incredible.

Talks about it.

Incredible documentarian.

When I talked with my friends, Black, Puerto Rican, Dominican, when I was a teenager, you know what we talked about?

In my family, you know what we talked about?

Because we are multicultural.

I mean, one thing about Latinos, we are the mestizo people.

So I come popping a 'fro, just like Angela back in the day, wearing a dashiki.

but I'm light-skinned, my cousin's darker than me.

My mom is telling me, "Hey, you ain't going over that side of Brooklyn, because that's where those Puerto Rican guys are and it's really bad."

And so in the family, I got this -- which happens a lot with Latino families throughout throughout Latin America is this color thing going on here.

The colorism.

Now, my nose is too white, my hair is too nappy.

Now, you tell a 10-year-old or 12-year-old if they don't talk like that in their head -- Mm-hmm.

Alright?

And boys go through this big time.

Mm-hmm.

Why do we need to, all of a sudden at 14 years old, have a six pack now, right?

We need to like -- right?

Because we have to be tough on the street, plus, look good for the TV, which is the images we grew up with.

I want to bring it back, because I don't want to miss what you're saying earlier about Europe, about what happened.

You're saying that we're missing something, something that happened that's very critical to the way that men act.

Well, in America, we don't understand where we come from.

I was just talking to the taxi driver about that.

I mean, first of all, we were -- my family was slaves.

I went back and I did Ancestry.com.

I can tell you the lineage of my bloodline, and all that stuff is amazing.

So we came through the West Indies.

That means we came through slavery.

I have no doubt, no doubt.

My grandmother used to use whitening cream on her face, right?

Just to adapt to New York.

You know, she came here and had her kids.

And when I say, "go back," we had a slave owner that made love to my great-grandmother, and now I got my cousin whose name is after the slave owner's name.

So you're now part of this sort of white heritage, 'cause your name is Wilson.

It's not an African name or something like that.

We did it with our religion.

That's were santeria comes from.

So this changes the psyche of a man, especially a man.

Right.

And I can bring it to a film by Charles Burnett in 1978 called "The Killer of Sheep."

I would recommend that film for anybody who wants to see what a hard-working African-American family has to deal with.

Yeah.

Don't have guns, don't have drugs.

They're just trying to stay alive.

So when you have this baggage that is now in our DNA -- am I dark enough, am I light enough?

Do I speak...?

Am I...?

It goes back to the question that you were saying in Toni Morrison's story about, you know, they want us the way they want us, right?

They want us quiet.

They want us calm.

Don't wear gangsta.

Non-threatening.

Don't do this.

Don't do that.

Straighten your hair.

I mean, I was so -- my identity was so mixed up as a kid that I used to conk my hair.

I was just like Malcolm X in the movie, where we were using the dye.

My mother used it, then I would -- We didn't have any durags back then, so what we did was we took Mama's stocking and put it on our head, right?

And that's where the whole durag comes from.

You talk about fashion, right?

But the baggage that came with that.

We wanted to do this with our hair, as we saw in the TV commercials when we were kids, right?

You know, the nice, blonde look.

I want to shift this, because, Josef, you are a Nigerian-Canadian and you have direct roots to Nigeria and to Africa, and it plays a lot in the work that you do.

It's a lot about young African men and coming of age and when an African becomes an American or when an African becomes a Canadian in that sort of global diaspora.

Does that pride do something for you?

That direct line home, does it give you a sense of groundedness as a man that you think Black Americans maybe don't have?

It definitely comes as a privilege, that sense of belongingness.

And tribe.

What tribe are you?

100% Idoma.

It's a very, very small part of Middle Belt Nigeria.

So it's adjacent to Abuja, the capital city.

I've been there a few times and I'm still really, really, really regaining my relationship with my roots, because I was born and raised in Canada.

I think the most important thing that I have been trying to establish through my work is that sense of bridging the gap.

So in the Western world, there's this massive, growing population of first-generation and second-generation Africans.

But a lot of the time, through American culture, just Western culture in general, whether you're in Canada or the US, it's often washed away from Monday to Friday when you're at schools, but then Saturday or Sunday, when you're at church or the mosque or you're the African part of your wedding, you regain that feeling of what it is to be from this rich culture.

But there's still that battle between Africanism and the Western world.

I love basketball.

I love hoop culture.

I love sports.

I love soccer, football, baseball and the amount of culture that's within that.

But there's also that part of me that's extremely deeply rooted in my native tongue, my native traditional wear, my native foods.

So mixing those two worlds is so important for me.

And being Canadian but now living in the US, where there's a much, much bigger population of of Nigerians or Ghanaians or Ivoirians, I'm starting to really exist within a non-apologetic African community that for a long time, didn't really exist.

And if it existed, it was very, very quiet.

It was more about assimilation.

100%.

How do you make this work?

Do as others do.

But now, it's like, well, with the music, with the food, with the restaurants, with the community work, you can really bring all those worlds together but still exist as an African living in America.

That cultural blend is so, so important.

So I say it definitely comes as a privilege, but bridging that gap is so important.

I want kids of this generation to be very aware and educated about what's happening back home.

Learn your language, visit more frequently, get a better sense of what city you're from, the community, do some work back there, and then bring that kind of energy back here.

Because America is already a country with so much vibrant cultures across places like New York and Houston and L.A.

But how do we make that even more deeply inclusive with different cultures, whether they're really, really small countries like Somalia or massive countries like Egypt and South Africa.

How do we blend those worlds?

So it's really important for me to see that blend, and that's kind of why the work I do takes that extremely seriously.

And I think that it's wonderful that you all have that sort of tribalism, but it's not toxic.

And I think that's really interesting, Joe, because your iconic series like "East Side Stories," it's about gang culture.

And so it's rooted in a kind of tribalism, a kind of pride, but then there's this toxic masculinity overlaid within it, and so it doesn't give that sense of energy or the sense of moving forward.

It actually is constricting.

It pulls you back.

And the people that exist within it, they either have to survive it or they die, versus something that can grow, something that's more vibrant, something that, it's grounded.

And I think that that is a lot of the difference of having that place to call home is like -- I think a lot of gang culture comes out of that sense of displacement.

Yeah.

And I think that a lot of young men now -- and I would love for you to speak on it -- they feel that sense of, where do I belong?

And I think that what's really sad is that the internet, the way that it's been able to radicalize young men or malign young men is because they feel like, there is no place in the world for me.

Do you feel that sense of -- I know a lot of your photography, it has isolated subjects -- one man or three men kind of standing alone against the world, so tell me about that.

Yeah, I mean, it definitely starts in the community, this gang culture.

I mean, Los Angeles is a special city.

It's really where gang culture kind of really took off.

Because when I went there right after the Rodney King uprisings, you know -- What year was that?

That's '92.

'92.

April '92 was what had happened, and May of '92 is when I went there on my own, didn't know anyone at all, went to this place called the Community Youth Gang Services, which was in the heart of South Central.

And that's where you would go to meet sort of former gang members.

There were lots of young men trying to change their situation, through employment, through education.

It still exists, actually.

I went there for ten straight days.

Wow.

And everybody who was coming in with the big boy -- what we called "the big boy money," you had The Wall Street Journal, you had USA Today, you had Time magazine.

And I was working for a small, little communist newspaper in Sweden, and nobody was like, "Who you work for?"

But what opened the door for me was I came from New York.

So an ex-gang-member brought me into watch, and into his neighborhood.

And he said, "Do you want to meet the homeboys?"

And I said, "Yeah, I want to meet them, but I don't want to meet them.

I want to meet their grandmothers."

Right, right, right.

And so my first week I'm there is, I asked his grandmother, "I understand there were riots in 1965.

What's different between the riots in 1992?"

Mm.

Mm.

And this is what I love about my job, is I didn't need to read anything, because I seen it on TV.

I remember the '60s, when Martin Luther King -- every every person that got assassinated, our streets were on fire in Brooklyn.

Bedford Avenue was on fire.

I remember taking the bus with my mama and we were going to Williamsburg, and that was when Malcolm X was assassinated, and the streets were just on fire throughout the country.

Wow.

So I had that in my back pocket.

Plus I read the "Autobiography of Malcolm X" about five times.

So I had that pocket book in my back pocket, and so that's the go-to, where I'm coming from when I speak to this grandmother.

And she started to tell me, "We had jobs.

It was really good here in the '50s and '60s when Goodyear was here this one was here and that one was here, so when you came out of high school, you could actually go work for a factory, then they started going south and then those disappeared."

Meanwhile, there's no trees in the neighborhood.

Meanwhile, there's no pools in the neighborhood.

There's very little basketball courts in the neighborhood.

So this gang culture kind of came out of the '60s, but the guns weren't there.

And so what happened when I got there was that crack was already there, the guns were there, and now cousins are shooting each other in families.

But I wanted to understand the history of Watts, not the history of gang culture.

What happened to this community?

What made this community change so radically violent?

Because I also photographed LAPD for six weeks for The New York Times Magazine, which is a book called "LAPD 1994."

So this -- that comes much later, but understanding where I'm standing and who that grandfather is down the street.

What was it like for you in the '40s and the '50s and '60s?

And learning a lot about them, from them.

And that's when it starts to hit me that this is much bigger than me.

This is not just about guns.

This is about the social fabric of a community, right?

Because I'm meeting people, that three generations are in gangs.

Yeah.

Oh.

So the grandfathers were in gangs and then cousins...

So this becomes a community.

It becomes a tribalism.

This is not just -- you know Yeah, and then the culture picks it up.

It's not just an after-school activity.

You got N.W.A.

who's there, you got Snoop who's there, and people are writing and spitting it out every day.

And my research, believe it or not -- a lot of people ask me how I got involved in gangs, was first looking at "West Side Stories" here, growing up with the movie, and then looking at New York gangs and going there and thinking that I'm going to have a really nice, cool time hanging out with gang members.

It was really, had a lot to do with the music, hmm?

But, you know, Tupac and Biggie, all these great rappers, if you listen to them carefully, they were the newspaper of the street.

Yeah.

Well, I'm glad that you bring guns into it, because the story of American manhood right now, guns are so entrenched in that story.

And I know, I don't imagine that that is something that maybe impacts either of you on the day-to-day now as much.

But it's really impacting and we're feeling the weight of how tethered men are to guns in this country every day because of the mass shootings, because of the gun violence.

I live in Harlem and it's like, very seldom you get a week without hearing that a young boy or somebody has been, you know.

Everyone's lives are so touched by gun violence.

And I mean, I don't want to put it on you, but what is it about men and guns?

I mean, maybe actually, for you, Josef, this might be extra strange, because you come from a country where gun control is much tighter.

And I know in Canada, despite the fact it's right across the border, this love of guns, this love of the power of guns and the things that they can do, it's not something I don't know that you grew up with, right?

Like, but here, you have to know.

You have to feel it.

Yeah, so when it comes to like, mass shootings, it's nothing that Canadians are unaware of or completely exempt from, right?

There's this thing where a lot of American people say they're going to move up north because Canada is a much better country, and it's a much smaller country.

You're speaking to like, 35 million people in comparison to 800 million or so with the U.S. You can't really compare them, right?

You've just got to think by the amount of people you're operating with.

Yeah.

So I wouldn't say we're exempt from it at all being in Canada, but living in the U.S. for the last three years now, but visiting for several years before that, I just think there's a sense of power that guns may provide people with, especially people that don't feel... Power.

Exactly.

There's no self-love.

Again, I keep bring it up.

There's no self-love.

There's no power distributed from the home.

There's no power distributed amongst your environment.

There's no power distributed amongst friend groups.

And a lot of the time, people feel lonely, and that nonverbal communication is often executed through ammo, unfortunately.

Right, because it's so accessible.

Right.

It's a power you can always get so easy, right.

I think this is something we're still trying to figure out.

I don't have all the answers.

Well, I think you do.

You have, not an answer, but something that you're inclined to.

Or I'll flip the question on its head.

What does it look like when a man loves himself?

You can sit with that, because I don't know.

Obviously, I don't know.

But you mention it so much, this concept of self-love being so central to the evolution of manhood.

You have to love yourself as a man.

But what that looks like, it's going to be different for a woman, for a nonbinary person.

Like, when a man loves himself, like, what -- maybe what even does his day-to-day look like?

Or how does he speak to himself?

Like, what kind of words does he use?

And I think that if you can't articulate it through words, what does that look like in the camera?

You know, what does that look like in your stories?

Is that a story you see or you're trying to tell?

I can tell you what can change a gang member.

Love, marriage, a child, especially a child.

A job.

That's what changes.

Nothing stops a bullet faster than a job.

Number one.

That's not my saying.

That's Father Greg Boyle from East Los Angeles, who's buried thousands of gang members over the years.

And he has a very interesting narrative.

You can look at his work, Father Greg Boyle.

He's the one who quoted that.

I know him.

I respect him.

I worked next to him.

But when a young man has a child and can embrace that child -- that's my son, that's my daughter.

I've seen 15, 16-year-old men change.

Unfortunately, maybe the opportunities that they want to change with aren't necessarily there, so they might go into the street to deal drugs just to bring money home for the kids.

I mean, this is, you know, well-documented.

But love is something that's tricky for us, especially for us men who have grown up without it.

And it took me 20-some-odd years to figure that out, through several relationships, to find the woman that I live with now, been married to 22 years.

It took a lot of work.

Took a lot of work.

But I do think that if you love that baby mama, that woman that you married or the woman that you care about, and you have this child together, that can change the narrative big time.

It really can.

Frustration, the gun, well, that still can come out, because simply, because maybe you can't provide, so you're going to go out and do what you need to do to be able to do that.

But I remember -- I can bring back a real life story, a real story that I was photographing in East L.A.

It was your typical Friday night, and that's usually when the guns come out and it's usually when these other rival gangs come into the neighborhood and to the park.

And there's a 14-year-old - I'm on the roof with this 14-year-old, he's got an AK-47.

Wow.

And he goes, "Take a picture of me," 'cause they're so young and naive.

And this is when I had to be parental with the camera because it becomes very dangerous.

Just like "City of God," the movie, "City of God."

A little bit like that.

And so there and he's ready to shoot.

I said, "Well, wait.

You see the helicopter that's above your head?

That's LAPD.

The minute the gun goes off, they see the spark, they put the lights down on you, they see their photographer was there.

My film goes to court, you go to prison."

And they go -- and they're 14 -- Yeah.

The power that that gives an individual to walk down the street.

Now, we can get into all kinds of conversations.

"I need a gun now to protect me."

You hear all these different things, but...

I've seen this more than once.

Well, then, we're up against a hell of a lot.

Yes, totally.

What you all are saying to me is like, so much of what has solidified about manhood, it begins in boyhood.

And so a lot of what it seems like the work is is outpacing the world that intervenes on men's self-perception before they ever even really enter school, before they go to college, whatever.

They've already decided, like, this is where I belong in the world.

This is where I'm situated.

I think that's what's so beautiful about your work, Josef, is that so much of it is about young boys, you know, seeing themselves in a different light before the world gets to them and tells them, "This is who you are.

This is what is expected of you."

And so I guess I wonder, like, when does a boy become a man?

Mm.

Like, what does...

I know, for a woman, so much of it for cis women, it's bodily.

You know, we know.

I remember when my mom was like, "You're a woman."

She kept me home at 12 years old and was like, "This is time.

You could get pregnant."

And that suddenly, it was like, the world was at my door.

But for men, it's like, I don't know.

Especially for Black men, for brown men, Yeah.

it's so different.

It's not like the movies where, you know, a young man is like, he has the talk with his father.

It's not like "The Cosby Show."

It's not like any of those things.

It's like, the world is at your door when?

Eight years old, nine years old?

When did you feel, "I'm a man now," or "I'm becoming a man"?

You can never put a time and date to it.

That's the most interesting thing about it.

I think it happened twice for me, if I'm being honest.

Speak on it.

I think when I was 15, my father left the home to pursue work in a different province.

If you know anything about a province or provinces.

It's like a state.

To an American.

Me being the eldest son, I felt like I needed to kind of step up a bit, and not a cliché way,, but just, like, be a lot more attentive to my mother and her needs.

Presence.

Right.

And I'm young, I'm not working a job at a time, but just being present in the home, helping out where I can.

I have a younger brother and an older sister.

I feel like even though my sister was always older, I am technically the man of the house at that moment, so I had more of a role to play within the home.

and it can be really, really small things like moving the car at night or washing the dishes or making sure my brother walks home safely from school.

But that was the first moment where I was like, wow, my father really is not present at all, and I had to take on that role in a way.

My mother never, like, threw that on me, but it was always something I had to think about.

like, man, I really have to be an OG to my younger brother, but also I have to protect my sister, regardless of age.

And then I'd say more recently at 26, when I moved to the U.S. Yeah.

Because then it's like, you're really leaving everything back home to pursue a very independent journey.

And ironically enough, my father left Nigeria at 26 to move to Canada.

So we had a brief conversation about that, actually pretty recently, about the synergy there between both of our lives and how you really leave everything to pursue, you know, the dream.

For him, it was the Canadian dream, and for me, it was the American dream.

And we're in two different industries of work in our careers, but I think I respect the fact that it was a decision made at a very similar time.

And I just always keep it in the back of my pocket when I'm thinking about my purpose and why I'm here.

You know, what the work I need to do to accomplish certain things.

I try not to stress myself too much.

I put too much pressure on myself.

But I think it's extremely important to know that there is this foundation you're working upon, and there's this building block that you continue to step upon.

So I think becoming a man isn't a moment that is necessarily like a switch.

[Snaps fingers] Like, it's not a switch went off in me and I'm like, "I have to become a man now."

It's not fiction, right?

This is real life.

Might be a lot of trial and error.

It might be a series of moments that build upon each other, but beyond everything else, just continue to grow.

I think a lot of the time, as a young man, we put dates on things, we put ages on things.

We meant to achieve certain things at a certain time of our life.

A lot of 35-year-olds are still boys.

[ Laughs ] You don't have to tell me.

A lot of 21-year-olds are already men.

So I think it's a matter of just knowing when it's time and taking it from there, but it could be a series of times.

Josef, I love that.

I feel like what you're saying, this is the tender portrait of manhood that I love, because I feel, honestly, for Joe and for you, I feel like it'll be very different, because you had an allowance of time and an establishment of responsibility.

And I think that that's the most ideal situation.

And I'm sure -- I know, being your friend, there are journeys and tribulations that come with that, but it's still like, you're allowed to grow and you're allowed to move at your pace and you're allowed to carry a dream, which is honestly, one of the most beautiful things, hearing that people still carry an American dream, a Canadian dream.

That's something that for me, we hear it so often, we're talking about the failure of the dream, the shortcoming of the dream.

And Joe, I guess, directing it to you, both reiterating the question of like, when does a boy become a man?

Because I feel like for growing up in the inner city, growing up in New York, it's when other people decide, that's a man.

And for a lot of young Black and brown men, especially in this country, you know, when you think about like, Tamir Rice, when you think about young men that it's like, when the world sees you as a man, you better rise to that occasion, or it could mean life and death.

And that's so much of what's been, you know, with George Floyd.

It's like, when someone sees you as a threat, you have to treat yourself as threatening in order to save your own life.

It might save your life.

What do you think about that?

I think back, you know, this conversation about manhood.

I was 12.

12.

12.

I was 12 and I was thrown into it.

You know, I had a father who abandoned me, so I had a stepfather who was not really there and mom wasn't being helped with just the basics of just...

Survival.

Survival.

So I had to, I was told by my mom, "You better go get a job," at the age of 12, so I start shining shoes.

Just so I have enough money to buy my own sneakers or get a little this and that.

Then I became a paper boy, delivering newspapers.

And so by the age of 12, I'm already -- I'm changing my brother's diapers.

I'm helping my mom with the groceries.

I'm doing the laundry.

So as a 12-year-old, I'm not on the basketball court with the rest of my friends.

And so I had to grow up hard, fast, quick.

And did you feel like a man or did you feel like a boy in man shoes?

No, I was a boy in man shoes.

When the world made me a woman, it was very different then when I began to feel like a woman.

No, I wanted to have fun and be just -- but I wasn't allowed to do that.

So I was feeling the sense of being suffocated.

And then it was tense in the small, little apartment.

So that was the first sort of door opening to, "Uh-oh, this is manhood."

And then from there on in -- we haven't even talked about trauma.

So you got all this trauma that you got in your back pocket and you have to deal with that as you move forward.

And then things are happening in the outside world where you're fighting with friends.

You know, you're getting mugged.

You get all this stuff that you can't really share with your mom in your apartment, in you're home.

So you reach out for other people that can hear you and see you.

Yeah.

To what we just talked about.

Which is other men.

Exactly.

And tougher men.

And, "This is the way it's gonna be, buddy."

So when you listen to them, listen to them, listen to them.

But I think when we talk about the feminine side of Joe, with my girlfriend or friends -- not too many, but the ones that I had at the time, I could share my worst with them.

I can talk about it now, right in front of the camera, but I can't begin to tell you what it's like to be in Rikers Island when you 17 and sold for a carton of cigarettes and passed around like you're a piece of nothing.

Wow.

And coming out of that and not understanding what therapy is today and how we -- One of the things that I talk about with my brothers a lot, my close friends, is therapy, right?

And getting to this manhood that we're talking about, getting to this place that we can find our station in the world, where we can get to our station.

And when you can talk about yourselves.

Because I think what you're saying is, that time when you begin to become a man, that's when you begin to start swallowing your feelings and sort of like that complicity of silence that we talked about is like, the first thing that happens is, whatever happens, let's not talk about it.

Let's not talk about it openly.

Let's not talk about it honestly if we even talk about it at all.

And so by the time that you are, you know, actually a man in body and mind, you're 26 years old, you're fully developed, you've already had all this baggage of that complicity and that world.

And I'm really glad that you even mention Rikers, because that's the invisible manhood that goes on in America is so many men that are in prison, so many behind bars.

My father was in prison.

My uncles were in prison.

And that is, so many men come of age through the system, and it's like, yet what we talk about is the men that you can see.

But right now, as we sit on this stage, there are so many men that are experiencing -- I have a prison writing group.

I write to a lot of men in prison, and they are experiencing manhood -- the joys, the disappointments, the tribulations, the community, the enemies, all of those things, away from the world.

We can't see them and it's invisible.

So when you speak on it, I'm glad.

Yeah, I did a story for The New York Times in the opinion pages, and it was about life after 17 years of prison.

And so I was in the state of California, which has a large amount of prisons throughout the state.

And so I was in a group of men who were all murderers, literally there for murder and doing life.

And it's a really interesting group.

They have a teaching plan and everything, and it's a little 12-step based, where many of them have had their own problems with drugs and anger management and anger, so it's not just about drugs and alcohol.

It's about where you come from.

Emotion.

And all of them, tears and everything.

These are serious, hardcore, hardcore gangsters, narco guys, and they all talked about trauma before the age of 10.

Hmm.

Wow.

This circle of 10 men that meet every week, and that's just one small program in one of the prisons in Vacaville.

And that was...

It just brought me back, right?

Right.

The trauma that you have to deal with as a young person, and girls -- and don't get it -- 'cause I've done a lot of work with women and women in prison and juveniles in prison as well.

And they go through even harder times, because of their body and everything else that happens to them.

You carry that.

As a young man, I couldn't come out at the age of 17 and tell my best friends what just happened to me.

Are you kidding me?

You know what happened to me when I came out at 17?

I couldn't even deal with what was in front of me.

That's the first time I put a needle in my arm.

Wow.

I followed my stepfather's footsteps, and we even shot dope together.

It was crazy.

Wow.

Yeah, it was very crazy.

But the manhood part.

Mm-hmm.

How do we get to a better place?

How do I get where Josef came from?

'Cause I always starved for that father that he had, always hungered for that.

And if you look at my work, you know, it's actually not seven books, it's ten books, right?

Oh, okay.

And so if you look at the work, it's all family-driven.

It's Joe trying to find his father that he never had or the mother he never had through other families.

So that's a blessing, but then sometimes a problem.

It's a burden.

It's a burden.

There's a lot of PTSD there, too.

But this is the conversation that I always wanted to have about photography, especially for us... That means the world to me, hearing you say that.

...for our kids, because there are very few role models that are Latino and African-American.

Now, today, it's different, but during my time.

Yeah, I can imagine.

You know?

Going up to The New York Times and telling them, "Hey, I can... Let's talk about East Harlem.

Let's talk about Spanish Harlem."

Let's talk about these brown people and hearing those stories about I'd never make any money shooting Black and brown people.

You know, you can't even say that today, right?

Even National Geographic gets called out recently.

Yeah.

So I just think that you're... We're all born, and I look at my grandson, he's two years old, and he's getting love and we're playing soccer with him.

He's got grandfather trying to play soccer with him.

But just this sense of like, belonging, support.

Wholeness.

And I know that these kids are gonna have a different way to go than me.

And my daughters cry about this all the time.

"Don't worry, Pops, we're gonna make sure that they're gonna have the best."

And that's where it starts, and that's why it's the kitchen table, and that's why it's the family that we care about, the both of us.

That's where you start with the girls, and for girls -- Don't get me started on the girls, because every time I go to our neighborhoods what's the first thing that they want to do when you take a picture?

They want to put their -- I said, "No, no, you ain't doing that with me.

That's not right.

That's not right, because I don't want others to see you in that way."

But that's how Instagram works.

And talk about the boys.

They may not have a Josef or a Joe as an uncle or someone else, but they have his Instagram, Right.

And they see all of that now, and I think we both know how this works, right?

These algorithms are so sharp.

They know what they're doing.

And beauty is beauty.

Now everybody's got to look beautiful.

My wife is going crazy because Instagram is not -- you know, she's an older woman.

She's bigger now.

"I still love you, mami.

I still love you."

I'm older, but it's all about young... And then that strength, that body becomes almost like a gun in a way, because it's like, I want to be like that.

Right.

But they don't understand all the other things that are involved to get there.

Mm.

Well, on "Generational Anxiety," I loved in the show, looking forward.

And so when I think about portraits of manhood and Josef, you know, you're actively storytelling now.

Joe, you're still working, also photographing.

What is the portrait of manhood that you want to paint with your work going forward?

Or what is the one that you want to exist in the world?

What does that look like?

I want it to be -- I want the portrait of manhood to be rather culturally inclusive.

Like I said earlier, I really want to bridge those gaps and tell stories beyond the stories that I may have the most the most knowledge on.

I think it's really important that we use storytelling as a sense of education, as a place to discover, as a place to rediscover.

And I think with social media, with the internet, with the relationships and conversations we've been having over the last few decades, we can get to a place where we become a lot more empowering of the cultures globally.

So I would definitely say, becoming more culturally inclusive of the storytelling and just providing space and making a way for everyone to feel a part of a story, whether they're embracing a culture they already know or they're gaining education or they're gaining knowledge on a culture they don't know that much about.

So I think it's extremely important to make it inclusive.

Yeah, for me.

Amazing.

And what about you, Joe?

For me, it's about dignity and respect.

Dignity.

You can ask the toughest kid in the neighborhood what they care about -- they want to be recognized.

It goes right back to the beginning of our conversation.

Are we being heard?

Are we being seen?

Not through the eyes of "America's Most Wanted" or I mean, that's the power that the both of us have, because we know what we can do with the camera, alright?

You can destroy a person or you can help a person.

And you can see it through our own history of photography, of how many people, how many slaves were hung on trees and what the image looks like today.

Today, it's not the hanging on the trees.

Today, it's the hoodie and the video cam.

"There he goes.

There's the thug.

Oh, my God, I've got to watch him."

So giving a man the time...

The time.

...to listen and to gather their story, because I think both of us know that the more we get to know a subject, sometimes it comes out in time.

100%.

It comes out more, you know?

Not just like, "Why do you want to be a gangster?"

No, no, no.

Just wait, listen... ...and it comes out.

And then, because I stay with people, I'm kind of like this turtle.

I work real slow.

And so working slow gives me the opportunity to revisit people.

Right.

And I tend to stay in touch with people through social media a lot.

But something else came up recently, revisited to me recently -- Charles Jones is an African-American young father, lives in Oakland.

They have about six kids.

I met him and Crea when they were homeless in San Francisco, and I'm still close with them now.

And now the kids have grown up, I got to do this family sort of revisit and do all this great work with them.

Hopefully, the kids are going on to school.

It's all the beautiful stuff that we really want to happen for our kids.

But he said something to me that always struck me.

He said -- and this was when he was 17.

He goes, "When you lay down with this woman and you're about to have sex with her... are you ready to be the father of that child?"

And this was a young man who is selling his own drugs on the street, who realized that having intimacy with the woman that he maybe is gonna fall in love with or maybe not, but that's a responsibility, because we already know what the other side of that is, right?

Yeah.

I mean, it's...

So the portrait of manhood you want to paint is one that takes responsibility, and I love that.

And also and change that, you know, that is the -- that is who we are.

Transformation.

We change from the worst to the best.

Yeah.

It's about redemption.

This photographer who, if you met him when he was 17, you wouldn't want to be around this guy.

I mean, he was hurting people.

Yeah.

Well, actually, I want to end there.

I think what a lovely thing would be is to ask you, like, if you could give 17-year-old Josef any advice on manhood, what would it be?

Start anywhere.

There is no rule book.

There's no right way to approach manhood.

It can be from working out in your bedroom to being a mentor at an after school program.

Start anywhere.

Like I said earlier, that idea of transitioning from being a boy to a man can happen at any time, and it can happen in instances as well.

So starting anywhere allows you to breathe the experience.

It's beautiful to see what can happen when that transition is created.

It's beautiful to see the stories attached to the transition as well.

And it's a wonderful journey whether you're learning or winning with just a little.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean, starting anywhere has taken you so far.

Oh, yeah.

I think that that's a wonderful thing.

What about you, Joe?

What would you tell your 17-year-old self about manhood?

One piece of advice.

Change takes time.

A lot of not so nice things are gonna happen in life, but that's life.

And so you need to -- Joe, you need to take a look at yourself and try to see if there's another way.

And also, helping others.

There's something about helping others which gets you out of your -- It got me out of my own situation where I wasn't worried about me all the time.

I was taking care of someone else.

And that could be just helping an old woman across the street or taking out the trash or learning that sense of responsibility as you grow.

Because boys are thrown into the wolves these days, to be responsible and to have a plan.

And we didn't really talk -- there should be a party to the conversation about where women are today and where young boys are today, and women are going a lot further faster than our boys are, our city boys.

And so, you know, how do we kind of come back to that a little bit and sort of have this togetherness?

Yeah, so.

Yeah.

Well, I told you I would ask last, what are you working on now?

Let's start with you, Josef.

I don't want to sound broad or anything like that or vague, but definitely doing a lot of inner work recently.

I love that.

Started therapy about six months ago, been going pretty frequently, and it's just helping me communicate a lot better than I've done in the past.

[ Exhales deeply ] Becoming a lot more -- So proud.

Yeah, becoming a lot more warm and inviting to conversations that have to do with family and really close friends.

Working on my communication.

Working on my ability to say no.

Working on my ability to confidently say yes, and just setting boundaries as well.

So a lot of inner work as well.

Creatively, I've got some really interesting work in the animation space that I'm slowly working on as well.

You know, NFTs are becoming a big thing and whatnot, and it's not necessarily an NFT, but there's the potential of that.

Working on this animated series that tells a story about the African diaspora as it exists in America with these five kids that form a basketball team and whatnot.

So it has its legs.

I'm excited about the journey, and I'm excited to see where it can go, for sure.

Nice.

Wonderful.

Um...

I'm working on -- actually just finishing editing a 10-year-long project called "Migrantes," which is following Mexican families across the border throughout the United States.

Wow.

And we started in Michoacan, Mexico, and crossed the border literally crossed the border, through the tunnels and all that other stuff.

But it wasn't about that.

It's more about, they picked our strawberries here, they pick our tobacco here.

They, you know, throughout the South, Arkansas, Saint Louis, Arizona, Texas, California.

And that was 10 years of investigative work, and so hopefully that'll be a book next year called "Migrantes."

So that's what we're working on.

Incredible.

Thank you both so much for being here.

Thank you.

Stick around.

Joseph Rodriguez is going to paint us a portrait of manhood.

Thank you.

Rodriguez: When I look at this photograph, it represents a lot of what young boys might be going through right now in the United States with the culture of guns and the way they are being expressed and just sort of availability to guns.

What we're looking at is a little boy with a plastic gun in his hand.

and those were always okay when we were children, but that plastic gun is now turned into something a lot more sinister called a real gun.

On my visit to Los Angeles after the Rodney King uprising, I wanted to learn for myself what was on the minds of young gang members and what that culture was like for them and for their families.

So I really wanted to get a conversation going with some of the grandmothers or the family members or the mothers or the fathers.

And my question to this grandmother was, what was it like in 1965 when the riots were in Los Angeles, as opposed to 1992, where there just had been riots in the streets of Los Angeles.

And she had told me and showed me where she was sitting, watching television with her grandson.

And some gang members came and fired bullets into the house and hit her grandson, and the bullet went through her grandson, through his stomach, and hit her in the arm.

And while he's at home and I'm talking to his grandmother, I'm also taking a photograph of little Anthony as he's playing with a toy gun, pointing it at a cartoon that's on television.

And so the photograph leaves me to think, not knowing the family situation, not knowing what his future is going to be like, is he really gonna be okay?

What is going through his mind?

And how will he be able to sort of grow up into a man with the trauma that happened to him and his grandmother?

And that's what the photograph sort of left me with.

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